The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Sixth Lecture

[ 1 ] If you continue reading the Gospel of Mark from the passages we attempted to explain the last time we discussed this Gospel, you will come to a significant passage that, while similar to the accounts in the other Gospels, can best be understood in its full meaning in the Gospel of Mark. This passage refers to the fact that Jesus Christ, after undergoing his baptism in the Jordan and his experiences in the wilderness, then, as it is said, went into the synagogue and taught.

[ 2 ] This passage is usually translated as follows: “And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught with authority and not like the scribes.” What does this sentence mean to a modern person today—no matter how devoutly they believe in the Bible—other than, one might say, a rather abstract phrase: “for he taught with authority, and not like the scribes”? If we look only at the Greek text, we find that the word which in modern language is simply translated as “for he taught with authority” is:

ὴν γαρ διδἁσχῳv αὐτοὐς ώς ἐξουαίχν ἕχων, χαὶ οὐχ ώç οί γραμματῑç
(ēn gar didamaskōn autous hōs exusiān echōn, kai ouch hōs hoi grammateis) “and not like the scribes.”

[ 3 ] If we now wish to penetrate the meaning of this significant passage, it will lead us once again into what we might call the mysteries of the mission of Christ Jesus. For I have already pointed out that the Gospels, just like the other writings that truly originate from the inspired realm, are not so easy to understand; rather, in order to grasp them, we must essentially bring together everything we have gathered over many years in terms of concepts and ideas about the spiritual worlds. And only such concepts can introduce us to what is meant when the Gospel says: “For he taught those who sat in the synagogues as an ‘Exusiai,’ as a power, as a revelation, and not as those who are here designated by the term γραμματῑç (grammateis).

[ 4 ] If we want to understand a passage like this, we must recall everything we have absorbed over the course of time regarding the higher, supersensible worlds. We have taken in that the human being, as he lives within our world, is, so to speak, the lowest link in a hierarchical order; that is to say, we must place the human being on the lowest rung of a hierarchical ladder. Then, following the human being, comes the supersensible world. In this we first find what we call, according to Christian esotericism, the Angeloi or angels, the first supersensible beings standing above human beings who influence their lives; next come the Archangeloi or archangels, then the Archai or spirits of personality; these are followed by the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes, and then we have the Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim. In this way, we can identify a hierarchical order of nine successive forms of being above humanity. And now let us consider how these various spiritual, supersensible beings intervene in our lives.

[ 5 ] The angels are those beings who, as messengers of the supersensible world, are closest to the individual human being as he lives on our Earth. They are the beings who, after all, have an influence on what we might call the destiny of an individual human being on our physical plane. When we turn to the Archangels, however, we are speaking of spiritual beings who, so to speak, already encompass a broader sphere of activity. Here we speak of beings whom we can also describe as national spirits, who thus organize and guide the affairs of entire national communities. When modern people today speak of a national spirit, they mean—as I have often pointed out—so many thousands of people whom they list, purely in terms of numbers, as living within a given territory. But when we speak of a national spirit from a spiritual-scientific perspective, we mean the national individuality, and we are clear that we are not focusing on the number of so many people, but on a real individuality, just as we speak of an individuality in the case of a single human being. And when we speak of the spiritual guidance of an entire national individuality, we designate the Archangels, the Archangeloi, as the spiritual guides of such a national individuality. So when we speak of these higher beings, we speak of them as real, supersensory creatures who have their spheres of activity. In the case of the Archai or the spirits of personality, also the primordial beginnings, we speak of those spiritual beings who are again distinct from the mere national spirits. When we speak, for example, of the French, English, German national spirit, and so on, we are speaking, so to speak, of something that is distributed across different regions of the earth. But there is something that is common to all people, at least to all Western peoples today, and in which these peoples recognize themselves. In contrast to the individual national spirits, we can call this the Zeitgeist, and we must speak of a different Zeitgeist for the age of the Reformation and of another in our own time. Above the individual national spirits, therefore, stand those spiritual entities we call Zeitgeists, and essentially these leaders of successive epochs are the Archai. They are, at the same time, Zeitgeists.

[ 6 ] If we ascend even higher to the Exusiai, we are essentially dealing with supernatural powers of a completely different nature. To get an idea of how the beings of higher hierarchies differ, at first glance, from the three just characterized—the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai—let us remember that a member of any given people is, in essence, very similar today to a member of any other people in terms of external physical constitution, that is, in terms of what they eat and drink. We cannot say that what goes beyond the soul-spiritual distinguishes peoples from one another. But even the successive epochs of time are such that we can say: The guiding spiritual beings relate only to what is soul-spiritual. But human beings are not dependent solely on the spiritual-soul aspect. What is spiritual-soul has a substantial influence on the human astral body. But there are also denser aspects of the human being. These do not differ very significantly from one another in terms of what the Archai, Archangeloi, and Angeloi have to do. But the beings that begin with the Exusiai and move upward exert a creative influence on these denser aspects of the human being; it is these beings that are creatively active in relation to them. We owe language and concepts of time to the spirits of time, the national spirits, the Archai, and the Archangeloi. But what lives in light and air, in the climate of a particular region, also exerts an influence on the human being. A different kind of humanity flourishes below the equator, and another in regions closer to the North Pole. We do not, however, wish to agree entirely with the statement made by a German philosophy professor in a widely read book: The most significant cultures had to develop in the temperate zone; for all those beings who have produced the most significant cultures would freeze to death at the North Pole and burn up at the South Pole! — But we can certainly say: In the various climates, we see how differently diet and so on affect human beings. It is by no means irrelevant to the national character what the external conditions are, whether people live, for example, in mountain valleys or on the wide plains. There we see how the forces of nature influence the entire human constitution. And since we know through spiritual science that we have nothing else to see in the forces of nature than the effects of those beings that are of a spiritual, supersensible nature, we must say: Spiritual, supersensible powers are at work in the forces of nature, which act upon human beings precisely through these natural forces. Therefore, we can conceive of a distinction between the Archai and the Exusiai in such a way that we say: the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai act upon human beings in such a way that they do not yet use the forces of nature for their activity, but use only that which acts upon human beings in a spiritual-soul aspect—namely, language, concepts of time, and so on. Their activity does not affect the lower members of his organization, neither the etheric body nor the physical body. In contrast, moving upward from the Exusiai, we have those beings who act upon human beings but who also act in the natural forces outside, who are the leaders and guides of air and light, of the various ways in which nutrients are processed in the realms of nature. It is they who preside over these realms of nature. What we find in lightning and thunder, in rain and sunshine, how this or that kind of nutrient grows in a particular region—in short, the entire distribution and order of earthly conditions—we attribute to spiritual beings whom we seek among the beings of the higher hierarchies. So when we look up to the Exusiai, we see their results not merely in those invisible effects that are, for example, the manifestations of the spirit of the age, but we see in the Exusiai that which acts upon us as light, and which also acts upon the plants as light.

[ 7 ] Let us now consider what is given to human beings as culture—that is, what they must learn in order to progress. Every human being in their own era is given what that era itself produces, but also, in a certain sense, everything that earlier eras have helped to produce. Only that which originates from the lowest hierarchies, extending up to the spirit of the age, can be preserved historically and become the subject of historical teaching and learning. What, on the other hand, flows forth from the realms of nature itself cannot be preserved in traditions and customs. Those, however, who can penetrate the supersensible worlds, through their supersensible faculty of knowledge also penetrate beyond the spirit of the age to even higher revelations. Such revelations then present themselves as something that lies beyond the spirit of the age, that carries more weight than what originates from the spirit of the age, that affects people in a very peculiar way. Every healthy person should truly take a moment for serious reflection and ask themselves: What has a greater effect on my soul—what I can learn from the traditions of individual peoples and the spirit of the times, from the historical tradition dating back to ancient times—or a magnificent sunrise, that is, the manifestation of nature itself, of the supersensible worlds? — For a person can become aware that a sunrise, with all its grandeur and power, can stir infinitely more in the soul than all science, all scholarship, and all art of all times. What nature reveals in general can be felt especially by someone who has, for example, once taken a journey through the galleries of Italy, who has seen everything that has been preserved by Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and so on, and has let it all take its full effect upon them, and who then climbs one of the Swiss mountains and beholds a spectacle of nature. Then one asks oneself: Who is the greater painter: Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci—or those forces that paint the sunrise one can observe from the Rigi?—And one will have to say to oneself: As much as we admire what human beings have ever accomplished, that which appears to us as the spiritual-divine revelation of the spiritual forces still seems to us to be the greater.

[ 8 ] But when those spiritual leaders of humanity appear to us whom we call the Initiates—and who do not speak from tradition but in an original way—then their revelation is something like the revelation of nature itself. But what can have the effect of a sunrise can never have that effect if others merely parrot it. What we have received in the tradition of Moses, of Zarathustra—if it is tradition, if it is communicated as it has been preserved by external culture, the spirits of the age, and the national spirits, and is now communicated—then nature, in contrast, acts as the greater force. For in the revelations of Moses and Zarathustra, it only had an effect as great as nature’s when these sprang directly from the experience of the supersensible worlds themselves. This is the power of the original revelations to humanity: that they press upon us like what nature itself has to reveal. But this begins only when we sense the Exusiai as the lowest hierarchy within the forces of nature.

[ 9 ] What, then, did those gathered in the synagogues experience when Christ Jesus came among them? Up to that point, they had been taught by the “grammarians”—those who knew what the spirits of the age, the spirits of the people, and so on had communicated. That was what they were accustomed to. Now came one who did not teach like them, but in such a way that his words were a revelation of the realm of the supersensible powers in nature itself, or of thunder or lightning. So if we know how the hierarchies ascend upward, then we understand such a word of the Gospel and grasp it in all its depth. We must feel this way toward such a word from the Gospel of Mark.

[ 10 ] However, in the case of human works that remain as they were—such as those of Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and so on—those with a sense of the supernatural that lies behind them can still perceive, even in the latest of these works, what was originally revealed. Thus, the great works of art and the great works of the spirit can indeed appear as an echo of the first works. And if we succeed in seeing what Raphael, for example, knew how to imbue his works with, if we succeed in reviving Zarathustra’s work, then we can hear something of what reaches us from the Exusiai.

[ 11 ] But in what the scribes—that is, those who had absorbed the ideas of the popular and contemporary spirits—taught in the synagogues, one could hear nothing that even remotely echoed the revelations of nature itself. Therefore, we may say: It is implied to us in such a statement that people in those days began to feel and sense that something entirely new was speaking to them; that through this man who came to them, something was revealed that was like a force of nature itself, like one of the supersensible forces that lie behind natural phenomena. People gradually began to sense what had actually entered into Jesus of Nazareth, what is symbolized by the baptism of John. In essence, those who could say in the synagogues, “He speaks in such a way that one feels as if the Exusiai were speaking, not merely the Archai, the spirits of the times, or the spirits of the people,” were not even particularly far along.

[ 12 ] Only when we succeed in restoring the richness and substance to that which has today become so diluted in abstractions and so thin in modern translations of the Gospels—through what we have absorbed in spiritual science—only then will we understand how much is required to truly penetrate what is written in the Gospels. It will take generations to even begin to explore all the depths that our present age can already sense. Much of what lies within the Gospels will only be able to be explored in the future.

[ 13 ] What the writer of the Gospel of Mark sought to portray, in particular, was essentially a further elaboration of what the one who—as one of the very first—had himself grasped the nature and essence of Christ through direct supersensible perception was permitted to teach—namely, what Paul was able to teach. Now one must understand what Paul actually learned, what he absorbed within himself through the revelation at Damascus. Although this event is described in the Bible as a sudden enlightenment, those who know the true reality of such an enlightenment understand how it can occur at any time for those who wish to ascend into the realms of the spiritual world, and how such a person becomes a completely different human being through everything they experience. In the case of Paul, it is indeed amply described how he became a completely different person through the Damascus Road experience.

[ 14 ] Even from a very superficial reading of the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul, you already know that Paul sees the Christ event—the event of Golgotha—as the focal point of our entire human development, that he directly links this event to the event described in the Bible as the first becoming human with Adam, so that Paul is essentially saying: What we must call the spiritual human being, the true, real human being, of whom there is only a Maya in Maya, descended once—as we say—in the ancient Lemurian era to become an illusion and all that he had to become in the flesh through successive incarnations, thus becoming a human being as he manifested himself through the Lemurian and Atlantean periods and the post-Atlantean period up to the Christ event. Then came the event of Golgotha.

[ 15 ] This was the state of affairs for Paul following his vision near Damascus. In the event at Golgotha, something occurred that is, at first glance, entirely synonymous with humanity’s descent into the flesh. For with it came the impulse to gradually overcome those forms of earthly existence that humanity had entered into at that time through Adam. That is why Paul calls the human being who appeared in Christ the new Adam, whom every person can take on through union with Christ.

[ 16 ] Thus we must truly see the gradual descent of humankind into matter—whether one calls it Adam or something else —- from the Lemurian human to the pre-Christian human, and then again the upward force and impulse, so that humanity, with all earthly experiences, with everything that can become of them on Earth, can return to the original spiritual state in which they found themselves before they descended. Now, if one does not wish to misunderstand the true meaning of evolution, one must not ask: Could humanity not have been spared the descent? Why did humanity have to incarnate and pass through the various incarnations, only to ascend again and have the same as before? - That could only stem from a complete misunderstanding of the true spirit of evolution. For humanity takes with it all the fruits and experiences of earthly evolution and is enriched by the content of the incarnations. This is a content that it did not possess before.

[ 17 ] Imagine, hypothetically, a human being descending through the first incarnation: there he learns; he learns through the second incarnation, and so on through all incarnations. These unfold in such a way that they are initially descending: the human being becomes increasingly entangled in the physical world. Then he begins to ascend again and can rise as far as he is able to receive the Christ impulse. He will one day return to the spiritual world, but will have taken with him whatever he was able to gain on Earth.

[ 18 ] Thus, Paul truly sees in Christ the focal point of all human development on Earth, which gives humanity the impulse to ascend into the supersensible world, enriched by all earthly experiences.

[ 19 ] How, then, does Paul view the sacrifice on Golgotha—the actual crucifixion—from this perspective? It is somewhat difficult to accurately convey this fact of the Golgotha sacrifice, this most essential fact of human development, in terms of modern concepts in the sense of Paul. For this understanding is also that of the writer of the Gospel of Mark. We must first familiarize ourselves with the idea that within the human being, as he stands before us today, there exists a microcosm, a small world, and we must first study everything that comes into consideration.

[ 20 ] The way human beings appear to us today, the way they develop between birth and death in a single incarnation, reveals two stages of development that are very different from one another. People usually do not distinguish between them, but they are very, very distinct from one another. I have—because our entire spiritual scientific endeavor is, in fact, more systematically structured than is usually thought—already drawn attention on various occasions to these two fundamentally different stages of human development. One can be observed in the period of human development that lies between birth and the point in time up to which modern human beings can recall in their individual lives. If you trace your memories back, you reach a certain point; beyond that, you do not remember. Although you were there before that and may have heard from your parents or siblings what you were doing before, and therefore know some of it, you still do not remember beyond a certain point. Normal memory breaks off at a certain point. In the best case, this is around the age of three. Before that, the human being is incredibly active and impressionable. What doesn’t one learn during this time, in the first, second, and third years of life! But modern humans today have absolutely no recollection of how these things made an impression on them. — Then begins the period through which the thread of ego-memory simply runs smoothly.

[ 21 ] These two stages of development should certainly be taken into account, for they are of extraordinary importance if one wishes to consider the human being as a whole. One must now trace human development precisely and without the prejudices of modern science. The facts of science do indeed support and prove what I have to say; but one must not take the prejudices of science into account, otherwise one might take paths that stray very far from the truth. If one therefore traces human development precisely, one will be able to say: Just as human beings live as social beings, as social individuals, so they can only live according to the condition determined by what they take in through that thread of memory that flows—in the best case—from about the age of three onward. In this lies everything of which one can say: It is the direction of human conscious life; all the things we consciously take in as laws by which we govern ourselves, as impulses worth emulating, and so on—all of that lies within it. What lies before that, we take in, in a certain sense, unconsciously for the ego-consciousness. This does not fit into the thread of what truly belongs to our full ego-conscious life. There are thus certain years preceding our ego-conscious life in which the environment affects us in a completely different way than it does later on.

[ 22 ] The difference is a very radical one. If we could observe the child before this stage, it would immediately become clear that, prior to the point in time that the person later recalls, the child feels much more at home within the general macrocosmic spiritual life. It does not yet set itself apart, does not yet isolate itself, but rather considers itself part of the entire environment, even addressing itself in the same way others address it. For it does not say “I want,” but “Little Karl wants,” and only later does it learn to refer to itself as an “I”—a point that modern child psychologists quibble over, but which does not contradict the truth, only the insight of the psychologists in question. In the first few years, the child still feels part of its surroundings, feels itself to be a member of the whole environment. It is only at the point that the person later recalls that they begin to isolate themselves from their surroundings as an independent being.

[ 23 ] We can therefore say: Whatever a human being is capable of assimilating as laws and whatever can constitute the content of their consciousness belongs to the second stage of their development, beginning at this defining point in time. The first stage of development involves a completely different relationship to the environment, such that one is much more immersed in and connected to the environment—one has a direct correspondence with it. You can only fully grasp what is actually being said if you hypothetically imagine that the consciousness which, in early childhood, provides this direct connection to the environment, were to be retained into later years. Human life would then unfold quite differently. Then the human being would not feel so isolated, but in later years would feel himself to be a member of the entire macrocosm; he would feel himself at home in the great world. This is lost to him. He has no connection later with the great world; he believes himself to be standing there in isolation. If he is a person of ordinary life, this isolation comes to his consciousness only in an abstract way. It comes to their conscious awareness specifically when they increasingly develop selfishness, when they increasingly want to shut themselves off, so to speak, within their own skin. Few educated people believe—which is actually complete nonsense—that as human beings we live only within our own skin. For the moment we exhale, all the air we have inhaled is already outside us, so that through inhaling and exhaling we are constantly in correspondence with the entire environment. It is an absolute Maya, the way human beings imagine themselves as beings. But their consciousness is already such that they must live in this Maya. They cannot do otherwise. For experiencing karma—people are truly neither very inclined toward it nor particularly ready for it in our time. If, for example, someone’s windows are smashed today, they perceive it—because they feel themselves to be an isolated being—as a personal injury inflicted upon them and become angry. But if they believed in karma, they would feel a sense of belonging to the entire macrocosm and would know that it is indeed true that we are actually the ones who smashed the windows. For in truth, we are interwoven with the entire cosmos. It is a complete absurdity to believe that we are confined within our own skin. But this sense of connectedness with the macrocosm is something only a child possesses in the early years. A person loses it from the moment onward, until they later recall it.

[ 24 ] This was not always the case. In earlier times, which are not so far behind us, human beings did indeed retain, to a certain extent, that consciousness of early childhood into their later years. That was in the days of ancient clairvoyance. But this was connected with a completely different way of thinking, and even of expressing facts. This is a matter of human development that spiritual scientists would do well to make quite clear to themselves.

[ 25 ] When a person is born into the world today—that is, when they come into our midst—what are they? — For people today, they are essentially the son of their father, the son of their mother, first and foremost. And if, in civil life, they do not have a birth certificate or baptismal certificate listing their father and mother—by which one can identify a person—then one knows absolutely nothing about that person and may even deny their existence. Thus, for the modern consciousness of humanity, a person is the physical son of his father, the physical son of his mother.

[ 26 ] People in a not-too-distant past did not think that way. But because today’s scientists and researchers do not know that people used to think differently and meant something entirely different by their words and terms, they arrive at entirely different interpretations of the ancient accounts. For example, we are told of a Greek singer, Orpheus. I mention him because, in a certain sense, he belongs to the era immediately preceding the Christian era. Orpheus was the one who established the Greek mysteries. The Greek period is the fourth within our post-Atlantean culture, so that, as it were, the culture of Orpheus prepared the way for what was later given to humanity through the Christ event. For Greece, then, Orpheus is this great forerunner. What would a modern person say, however, if he were to encounter a person such as Orpheus? They would say: He is the son of this father and the son of that mother—indeed, modern science might even investigate his inherited traits. There is already a thick book today that lists all the inherited traits from Goethe’s family and thus attempts to summarize Goethe based on these inherited traits. People did not think this way in Orpheus’s time; they did not regard the outer, physical human being and his characteristics as the essential, but rather they regarded as the essential in Orpheus that which enabled him to become the inaugurator, the true leader of pre-Christian Greek culture, and it was clear that what lived within him as a physical brain and nervous system was not the essential. Rather, what was regarded as essential was that he carried within himself an element—in what he experienced—that originated directly from the supersensible worlds and that then, through him, met with a sensory-physical element on the stage provided by his personality. The Greek did not see in the personality of Orpheus the physical aspect derived from father and mother, perhaps also from grandfather and grandmother; that was quite unimportant to him, it was merely the outer expression, the shell. What was essential to him was what originated from the supersensible and met with the sensible on the physical plane. Therefore, the Greek said to himself: When I have Orpheus before me, it hardly matters that he is descended from a father and a mother; but what does matter is that the soul-element through which he has become what he is descends from a supersensible realm that has never had anything to do with the physical plane, and that a sensuous-physical element could act upon this supersensible aspect of his personality—through what human beings were even back then—and unite with it. And because the Greeks saw in Orpheus, as his essential nature, a purely supersensible element, they said of him: he is descended from a Muse. He was the son of a Muse, Calliope; he was not merely the son of a physical mother, but of a supersensible element that never had any connection with the physical.

[ 27 ] Had he been merely the son of the muse Calliope, he would have been able to bring to light only that which was a manifestation of the supernatural world. But by virtue of his era, he was also called upon to express that which was to serve the physical age. Therefore, he was not merely a mouthpiece for the Muse, for Calliope, just as in earlier times the Rishis were merely mouthpieces for the supersensible powers; rather, he lived out the supersensible in such a way that his living it out had an influence on the physical world. Hence he is descended from his father Öagros, who was a Thracian river god. What Orpheus proclaimed was thus connected on the other side and adapted to the climate of Greece, to what external nature in Greece provided, to the Thracian river god Oeagros.

[ 28 ] This shows us, then, how what was essential in Orpheus was seen in what lived within his soul. That is how people used to be described. They were not described as they were later, when people said: “He is the son of this or that person,” or “He is descended from this or that city”—but rather, people were described according to their spiritual worth. In the case of Orpheus, it is now extraordinarily interesting to see how intimately the entire fate of such a person was perceived—one who, on the one hand, was descended from a muse, and on the other, from a Thracian river god. Such a person had not, like the ancient prophets, merely absorbed the supernatural, but had already absorbed the sensory. He was already exposed to all the influences that the physical-sensory world exerts upon us.

[ 29 ] We now know that human beings consist of various constitutional elements: the lowest, the physical body; then the etheric body—which, as we have said, contains the opposite sex within itself—; and then the astral body and the I. A person like Orpheus, on the one hand, still sees into the spiritual world because he is descended from a muse—you now know what that means. But on the other hand, his ability to live in the spiritual world is undermined precisely by his life on the physical plane, by his descent from his father, the Thracian river god. This undermines his purely spiritual life. With all the earlier leaders of humanity in the second and third post-Atlantean cultural periods, in whom there was merely a speaking of the supersensible worlds through them, it was the case that they could, so to speak, perceive their own etheric body as something separate from the physical body. In the cultures of ancient clairvoyance, even among the Celts, when a person was to perceive something they were to reveal to their fellow human beings, it was revealed to them through their etheric body stepping out of them. This etheric body then served as the vehicle for the forces that descended upon them. Now, if the messengers were men and their etheric bodies were therefore feminine, they perceived that which conveyed something to them from the spiritual worlds in a feminine form.

[ 30 ] It should now be shown that Orpheus, insofar as he was in direct contact with the spiritual powers—because he was already the son of the Thracian river god—was exposed to the possibility of being unable to hold onto what was revealed to him through his own etheric body. And the more he immersed himself in the physical world and expressed what he was as a son of the land, the more his clairvoyant powers slipped away from him. This is depicted in the fact that Eurydice—his revealer, his soul-bride—is snatched from him by the bite of a viper—that is, by what comes from him as human—and carried off into the underworld. He was to regain her only through an initiation that he then had to undergo. Wherever a descent into the underworld is spoken of, an initiation is meant. Thus he was to win back his wife through an initiation. But he was already too deeply entangled with the physical world. He did indeed gain the ability to descend into the underworld, but when he came back up, when he saw the sun of the day again, Eurydice slipped away from him. Why? Because when he saw the sun, he did something he was not allowed to do: look around, look back. That is to say, he violated a commandment that had been strictly imposed on him by the god of the underworld. What is this commandment? That the physical human being, as he lives today on the physical plane, must not look back beyond that specific point in time where the macrocosmic childhood experiences lie, and which, if they were to penetrate into later consciousness, would restore the old clairvoyance. “You must not,” says the god of the underworld, “harbor a desire to truly penetrate the mysteries of childhood, to remember where the threshold stands.”—Because he does so, he loses the ability to see into the future.

[ 31 ] Thus, something extraordinarily delicate and intimate about Orpheus is portrayed through this loss of Eurydice. This is simply a consequence of the human being becoming a victim of the physical world. He has entered, with a being that was still essentially rooted in the supersensible, into what he had to become on the physical plane. As a result, all the forces of the physical plane assail him, and he loses Eurydice, his own innocent soul, which modern man must lose; he loses her. And the forces into which he is then cast tear him apart. This is then a kind of sacrifice of Orpheus.

[ 32 ] So what is it that Orpheus first experiences as he transitions from the third to the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch? He first experiences what the first stage of childhood consciousness sheds: the connection with the macrocosm. It is not there; it does not carry over into conscious life. And just as the human being is in his true nature, he is consumed, killed by the life of the physical plane, which actually begins only with the aforementioned epoch. — Now picture this human being, who is, so to speak, the human being of the physical plane, who in today’s normal consciousness recalls back to a certain point in time; before this lie three years of childhood. This human being, with the thread of memory, is so entangled with the physical plane that Orpheus, in his true essence, cannot endure it within him, but is torn apart. This is the true human spirit of the present age, the human spirit that shows us how deeply a human being can be entangled with matter. This is the spirit that, in the sense of Pauline Christianity, is called the Son of Man. You must once and for all make this a concept of your own: the Son of Man, who is found within the human being from the point in time back to which the human being can recall today, with all that the human being can acquire from culture. Take this human being into your mind, and now imagine everything that a human being could be through the connection with the macrocosm, if what enters from the macrocosm in the first years of childhood were to be added. In the first years of childhood, it can be nothing other than a foundation, because the developed human ego is not yet there. But if it were to flow into the developed human ego, then what happened at the very moment when the Spirit descended from above upon Jesus of Nazareth through the baptism in the Jordan would occur: the three innocent stages of childhood development would blend together with the rest of humanity. That is the next step. And what was the consequence of this? The consequence was that this innocent childhood life, when it sought to develop on the physical earth, could develop for only three years—as it develops everywhere for only three years—and then met its end on Golgotha, that is, it could not blend with what the human being becomes by the point in time up to which he can then normally recall.

[ 33 ] If you think this through: what it would mean if all that connection with the macrocosm—which emerges dimly and hazily in the early years of childhood but cannot yet truly shine because the child does not yet have a sense of self—were to blend into a human being; and if you think further about how, when it dawns in later consciousness, something would form, something would fall into us that does not originate from the human within us, but from the entire depth of the world from which we are born—then you have the interpretation of the words that were spoken in relation to what is represented in the descent of the dove: “This is my beloved Son; today I have begotten him!” That is to say, it is Christ who has been incarnated here in Jesus of Nazareth, “begotten”—the Christ who was in fact born into Jesus of Nazareth at the moment of John’s baptism and who stood at the height of that consciousness which people otherwise possess only in the first years of childhood, but with all the cosmic sense of belonging that a child would have if it knew what it feels in the first three years. Then, of course, those words would also take on a completely different meaning: “I and the Father”—the cosmic Father—“are one.”

[ 34 ] If you let this sink into your soul, you will begin to sense a little of what, so to speak, was the first fundamental element of the Damascus Road experience for Paul, and which is expressed in these beautiful words: “Unless you become like little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven!” This saying has many meanings, but also this one. Paul said: “Not I, but Christ in me!” That is, the being who possesses such a macrocosmic consciousness as a child would have if it could permeate the consciousness of the first three years with the consciousness of later years. In today’s ordinary human being, these two aspects are separate; they must be separate, for otherwise they could not coexist. Nor did they coexist in Christ Jesus. For after those three years, death was inevitable—and under the circumstances that unfolded in Palestine. They did not unfold in this way by chance, but through the interplay of these two factors: the Son of God, who is the human being from the moment of birth until the development of ego-consciousness, and the Son of Man, who is the human being after the moment of attaining ego-consciousness. The coexistence of the Son of Man and the Son of God gave rise to the events that subsequently led to the events in Palestine.